Reasonable Person Principle (2009)
cs.cmu.edu
cs.cmu.edu
I actually think that is a really, really bad thing to do in a university. That is because unversities are full of seniority and dependency relationships, and in an unequal relationship informal conflict resolution puts the weaker party at a disadvantage.
Solving things in private is appropriate in a group of peers, say a small company among friends, or a family, but whenever there is an inequality in power, teacher/student, manager/employee, it is important to not handle things in private. It's one of the reasons universities tend to be so scandal ridden, and why you have these stories of say, sexually abusive teachers who somehow are able to brush it under the carpet for decades.
It's also the reason why the military tends to be hyper-formal when it comes to complaints, because it is so hierarchical. Solving things privately when one party exercises authority over the other will inevitably produce some very screwed up results.
Problem is obviously that in any institution like a university faculty the line between reasonable issue and unreasonable complaint is really blurry.
for a few thousand years we've been debating how to design institutions, if it was just 1. be reasonable, 2. don't be unreasonable, 3. don't be offended we'd have fewer problems than we do
Ironically, the post is not a command, and edict, or an enforced policy. It's an informal request. If you have an issue that you don't think fits, you are free to disregard it. That is the power of the RPP.
The RPP sounds more like a clause in a corporate mission statement. Trite, insincere and, I'm sure, broken regularly and with glee by everyone who matters in the organization.
I’m sure abusive organisations exist and all I can say is if at all possible, and it’s almost always possible, please leave for your own sake. There are better places to live and work. I do not recognise the world you describe.
I can't see the writing. We're learning OpenCV, but I never learned Python. I think my paper was graded incorrectly. My dad passed away, so my coursework is suffering. I should've been in the acknowledgements in my lab's paper. One of my group members is useless. My lab partner smells... like, a LOT. So-and-so keeps taking our oscilloscope. Our workspace is too cold. The professor always calls on women (or Indians or the front row). Why do all groups need to bring a vegetarian option to their presentation but the group with the vegetarian doesn't need to bring meat? The Greek groups all share old exams with each other but not with anyone else. Why does the department need to find a minority instead of just hiring the most qualified applicant? Why can't people just let personal insults roll of their back if their research work can stand on its own?
People from a ton of cultures and backgrounds are jammed into one institution. Of course there will be friction, and it shouldn't be the job of the university president to tell a chronically offending student to only take one slice of pizza at the Friday research talks and go back in line for getting seconds. Also, everyone has a different opinion of what "a big deal" is. Thus, for the sake of everybody and everybody's academic and social development... just be cool. Be reasonable.
"Solving things in private" actually means that the power-brokers will have private "off-record" discussions to determine the fates of people who have no say in the discussion and don't even know the discussion happened.
It's a quaint principle though. Something for graduate students to aspire to while they're grinding away in the lab at 3am.
It’s a very scary thing to live in the real world.
a Reasonable Person would understand the principle is a guideline for behavior within a community, and your judgement as a person is still required.
Abusive behavior is different from a disagreement between paths forward on a research project, for example, where working it out with peers is better than escalating it up the chain. During disagreements assume the other party is also a Reasonable Person vs. assuming ill will until proven otherwise.
There may be power dynamics, and this doesn't change those. A person in power can be a bad actor with or without these guidelines. Taking the extreme that this helps those in power be bad actors requires more evidence, as it assumes people will blindly follow this even when the other party is obviously not a Reasonable Person.
Friendly reminder: in several states it’s illegal to record the interaction if both parties haven’t consented so you should record yourself asking the other person for consent and their agreement if either one of you are in one of those states.
Is'nt this the case for pretty much any relationship?
A father-son relation or even a spouse relationship in many cases?
The formal process should always be available, but more like a last stop. It can document what informal steps were taken, (they likely failed - thats why they are doing it). Now both parties are sort of shamed if there were steps missed?
Is there harm in trying out a private meeting, knowing one can always have formal channels available at their disposal?
Possible negative outcomes:
1) The senior person is sufficiently abusive and skilled as to shut down discussion and convince you that formal channels would be fruitless (or even actively harmful to you)
2) The senior person now thinks less of the junior and will subtly sabotage them (especially harsh/pedantic grading, a lack of mentorship and support, etc.)
3) The junior person no longer trusts the senior person, and this will sabotage the junior (refusing mentorship and support, ignoring genuinely useful feedback)
4) A lot of issues are "twenty people all have this minor complaint" - the senior can gaslight all twenty people that no one ELSE has ever made this complaint so clearly they're too sensitive, and no one else ever realizes there's more than one victim so they write it off
5) Twenty people ALL have issue with the same one comment the senior made, and he's now getting mobbed - and once people realize it's twenty-on-one, mob justice mentality kicks in and they feel emboldened to say that the senior DEFINITELY needs to be cancelled
6) Twenty people all have DIFFERENT issues with the same one comment, and the situation is now a 50-page-long flame war before an administrator finds out and locks the thread.
7) People assume that the policy should be interpreted as "we don't care, please don't bother us" and just fail to bring up issues at all
8) People with anxiety feel like they need to do the big scary personal confrontation first, and thus fail to bring up the issue at all
(These are not just hypotheticals - I've either been in the situation or seen friends in that situation.)
More awareness and resources provided to the victim? There can be a 3rd party org, a private arbitration that is sworn to privacy that can guide the victim so that he does not suffer from the above weaknesses?
Knowing that the issue is being watched even though privately should cause the more powerful person from abusing the situation?
I don't think they consulted with a psychologist before coming up with this "principle".
Telling someone they're not being reasonable is one of the worst things you can do in any conversation. And if you feel offended by it, that's entire normal and, well, reasonable.
Telling someone not to be offended is similarly completely counterproductive.
When you're in a difficult situation, you should generally avoid focusing on what you perceive to be personal characteristics of the other person, or on telling them how they "should" be responding -- and instead focus on objective realities that you can use shared problem-solving techniques on.
Maybe this suggests the robustness principle: "be conservative in how you behave but liberal in what you accept from others".
One should not tell others that they are unreasonable and be reasonable enough to understand that someone might still tell them that they are, then act accordingly.
That said, the wording used is more like “are you sure you’re approaching this reasonably?” rather than as an assured statement of “you are being unreasonable”, and I feel that difference may be significant in terms of distribution of response.
This is ironically and needlessly confrontative. I think you are not being reasonable. Now don't get offended, I'm just the voice of reason telling you what is, and I already have my principles in place that won't be challenged. Me, unreasonable? That's quite the offensive thing to say, how dare you!
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/
The "reasonable person" is also the implicit basis for a modern, civilised legal system.
That said, I am not convinced that a "corporation" is a reasonable person.
- George Bernard Shaw
I'm gonna say that's bias to the point of being untrustworthy. You could also say 'therefore, the unreasonable one always gets his way, AND SO HE SHOULD'.
Reasonable minds might criticize this position :)
Reasonable person principle is about being a decent person it is not about Copernicus accepting geocentric model and living rest of life with it.
Resilient systems should anticipate failure.
And so they do.
The implication isn't that everyone will be reasonable all of the time - it's that at any point in time, someone will be reasonable. When one party becomes unreasonable, the other party may still stay reasonable. If they both can't, it's likely there's a currently-reasonable third party nearby. Etc.
Works well enough in meatspace.
How do we know? How do we know if it's reasonable for someone to complain, or reasonable to reject the complaints?
There is no single agreed definition of "reasonable" so it can't be detected or separated from "unreasonable".
In all, "just be reasonable" is equivalent to "our judgement and rank supersedes yours, therefore your complaints will be ignored." This doesn't necessarily mean the weaker side has a valid argument, there is just no unbiased objective way to know.
If I assume you intend to make me a delicious soup, that is still quite dangerous to me if your intent is to make me a delicious shrimp gumbo -- You do not generally intend me harm, but to achieve that intent we need to communicate about my specific allergy to shrimp.
It's not your job to find the good person beneath the layers of trash. Generally speaking, our faults don't dwindle upon closer inspection, and even if they did, life is short, and you probably have other things to do.
If this is someone that you encounter a lot, there is nothing wrong with being wary and observing their trends.
You don't always have to have boundaries, but it's okay to sometimes decide that you have some. If you try to define your boundaries perfectly so they can never be argued with, that's a trap to be exploited by those who like arguing.
I have the same problem. What I've found to be helpful is that I have several friends who don't gleefully suffer fools and are always willing to help serve as a second point-of-view on whether someone is just generally an asshole.
It's a lot easier to tell if someone is trying to sell you a snow-job if you can get the perspective on how they are outside of your field-of-view.
> The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly paradoxical idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance.
Arriving at the paradox that an infinitely tolerant society can be also infinitely intolerant at the same time. Which is pretty much a given if intolerance and tolerance are axiomatically on the same scale (as the nameing of the terms would suggest).
This is pretty much equivalent to this thread's topic, that a arbitrarily reasonable person may tell somebody they were not reasonable, not just slightly less reasonable or actually, reasonably bad, but just approachung zero reasonable, or infinite un-reasonable. But no, there's no logic in this.
In the long term, the CMU computer science culture starts interpreting unreasonableness as damage and stops inviting it to parties and collaborations and recommending it forward to peers outside the institution.
You'll graduate, and your degree will take you where it will take you. No more and no less.
I understand that the piece was outlined in order to somewhat rule the flood of requests and expectations on both sides in hope of reducing the intensity of conflicts.
Reason requires an arbiter, otherwise it's just a conviction by whatever means. Rules and regulations are an arbiter proxies.
So the appealing to be "reasonable" probably points to some deficiencies in the current rules, which no longer match the status quo.
Say, CS support requests to a team of just 3 may not be possible anymore to fullfill in, say, a week's time as when that team was 5 (the glorious do more with less). Same rules - different status quo.
What I'd find "reasonable" is a clear outline of the present deficiencies and mismatches to the current rules. Externalising the status quo and appealing to that. But this would be surely considered "unreasonable" by the overseers of CS Dept. That is politics dictate the reason.
Imagine if everyone getting angry at some group, strangers or neighbors followed that advice. It's also the recommendation from my government for disputes about tenancy, trade, employment, etc.
- unreasonable people will not doubt themself, but reasonable people will. So this discussion has a tendency to turn in favor of the unreasonable.
- unreasonable persons will make you pay for not being on their side. Coming to them gives them a heads up for doing that.
- you usually have less problems with reasonable people, so if you do have a problem, there is more chance the opposite party is not reasonable, and hence risking point 1 or 2.
So I'd say, "test if the opposite side is reasonable with a smaller grievance first".
> Everyone expects everyone else to be reasonable.
> No one is special.
> Do not be offended if someone suggests you are not being reasonable.
How delightfully 20th century! It reminded me of things like Web 1.0 and similar nostalgia :)
Doesn't this just seem like a silly failure to live up to the principle? Be reasonable - except over here where everyone acts like arseholes...
The RPP was great for a graduate computer science department. I only learned years later that not everyone is reasonable...
Few consider themselves the villain.
You wait until I tell this person about Twitter!
Well there's you problem. People don't agree on what is good for the community. Someone might wish to stear a community in a particular direction, with the best intentions of improve the community for all its members, but to others that will seem completely unreasonable and hostile.
But I would argue with the usefulness: this construct allowed flexibility and offered options if rules were not flexible enough to adequately encompass what happened... seen like this it could actually be a boon for devs... or not ;)
I had a colleague who became absurdly cold to me, ignoring me for weeks. I tried to speak with him and find out what had happened but he gave me the silent treatment (we didn't work directly together, adjacent projects, so the lack of communication wasn't an issue for the work itself). Finally, one day he decided to pull me aside and air his feelings. It turned out it was a misunderstanding, but it had turned into nearly two months of awkwardness in the office (I worked with the people who sat near him and was often in his space as a result). And even if it hadn't been a simple misunderstanding, I still never knew what the problem was until he finally spoke. If it had been the result of deliberate malice or carelessness on my part, then we could have tried to resolve it much earlier (or found an inability to resolve it if it had been a fundamental conflict of views or something), but the silence made it impossible to even address.
It is be impossible to expect a person above you in a hirarchy to be reasonable.
Why's that?
This is, however, only as bad as your lack of leverage as a subordinate. If your dissatisfaction can make your superiors' lives harder (by quitting or by working suboptimally), you'll find that they become quite a bit more reasonable.
Also, there can be no rule without exceptions.
I thorougly enjoyed the article and it definitively got me thinking. I do believe in the reasonable concept. I definitively have met many reasonable persons- but I have also met equally many or more who are not. What does it even mean "to be reasonable?" It is subjective. Because I can be reasonable but you cannot is what proves the statement.
A father and son team built a rocket for the X Prize Lunar Lander challenge. They got some impressive results. Their team was called Unreasonable Rocket.
EDIT: That said, in this example unreasonableness was about personal endeavor, not about interacting with others or expectations toward others.
It is just using the words "reasonable" and "unreasonable" in a completely different context, where they don't mean the same thing as in a discussion of people who are attempting to get along in good faith or not.
On a side note, human reasoning happened long before there was a precise definition and set of frameworks, and continues in most cases without a direct connection to either. "Reasoning" has a different meaning in different contexts just like "reasonable".
Most words have a cluster of meanings depending on context.